Here’s why iService gets smart money to extend the lives of smartphones

Photo credit: Pexels.

“In today’s world, people don’t panic as much when they sprain their hand as they do when their phone falls flat on the ground!” quips Ankit Chowdhary, co-founder of iService.

The big phone brands are too busy selling new phones in the world’s fastest growing market to alleviate that pain. That leaves the local kirana shops to fill the breach, but they inspire little trust. Here’s where iService comes in.

“Standardizing the quality of service is something that we strive to fix,” Ankit tells Tech in Asia.

A lot of smart folks think this is an important problem to solve in India, which has a frugal culture very different from the use-and-throw attitude in the US.

Its backers include Freshdesk founder Girish Mathrubootham, TaxiForSure co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna, Tapzo CEO Ankur Singla, former flipkart executive Mekin Maheshwari, and Belong co-founder Vijay Sharma.

This is evident from the US$441,000 seed investment into iService by India’s early stage VC Blume Ventures. “Ankit has a great understanding of the customer, changing trends, supply chain, and the retail experience required to build a branded differentiated service in the gadget repair space,” says Karthik Reddy, managing partner of Blume Ventures.

Other backers include Freshdesk founder Girish Mathrubootham, TaxiForSure co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna, Tapzo CEO Ankur Singla, former flipkart executive Mekin Maheshwari, and Belong co-founder Vijay Sharma. “Ankit and iService have been building a solid business in this large, unsexy, and highly fragmented repairs and warranty industry,” says Girish. “In a world obsessed with gadgets, downtime due to repair is something no one wants to deal with. iService has managed to provide a reliable fix for gadgets within hours together with ensuring that the customer doesn’t feel cheated,” adds Aprameya.

Photo credit: iService.

Reuse culture

Some others have the same idea. One of them is Munich-based B2X, which started rolling out “smartbars” last year for repairs and servicing of smartphones. Just this week, Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi entered into a deal with B2X to service Xiaomi phones in India.

Ankit is happy to co-exist with B2X. Whereas the smartbars cater to the requirements of big brands and their warranties, iService is more customer-focused. The closest parallel is US-based Uber for smartphone repairs, iCracked.

Going ahead, iService too has ambitions of becoming a platform for after-sales service providers in the country. What sets the foundation for its growth, however, is the painstaking work done over the past couple of years. “We have backward-integrated in the supply chain for spare parts which are going to be at the centre of this industry,” Ankit tells Tech in Asia.

Another funded startup in this space is JustLikeNew, operating in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Delhi-NCR. A few months ago, it closed a pre-series A funding round of US$500,000 from a bunch of angels, including co-founder and CEO of Capillary Technologies Aneesh Reddy, Sanjiv Bhatia of Harvard Business School Angels, and Vikas Tandon, managing director of Six String Ventures.

There aren’t any official statistics on the size of this market in India. A 2012 report by Frost & Sullivan pegs the Indian calibration and repair services market at US$103.1 million, with an annual growth rate of 13.3 percent.

I have a dead Xiaomi Mi4 and a dying Oppo Find 7 lying at home which I’m reluctant to throw away. Perhaps I’ll get it repaired after all to extend its life.

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from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/iservice-extends-lives-of-smartphones
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